Welcome to You Ask Andy

Sarah Fields, age 8 1/2, of Wichita, Kansas, for her question:

Must we cut down a redwood to tell its awe?

No, we don't have to do this. Rangers and other experts can tell the age of a giant redwood without chopping it down. Even ordinary folk can guess its age, though their guesses may be a few hundred years too old or too young. A tree expert has a way to learn the exact age of a tree. But to do this, he must bore a hole through its woody trunk. Of course, if everybody did this the redwoods would be riddled with holes and the great trees would soon die. So we allow only a ranger to make the test. He hates to harm the Big Trees. So you can bet your boots that he hardly ever bores holes to tell how old they are.

This summer, many people plan to visit the beauteous redwood groves of California. These giant trees have been guarded for many years. But some of them have fallen and died natural deaths.. These forest.giants~ were saved and_prepared for visitors and we see thick, wide slices of their trunks on display. From side to side, a sliced trunk may measure much more than the height of a tall man. Around the big circle there is a tough, bumpy layer of reddish brown bark.

The round slice of wood is beautifully marked with grooved lines, in shades of light and darker rusty brown. These lines form a pattern o€ smaller and smaller circles, one inside another. They are the tree rings that reveal the age of the might giant. Each year the Big Tree added a new ring of wood around its trunk, under the bark. The smallest circles are in the middle of the round slice. They were built when the old giant was a thin, slim baby tree. Each year a new ring was added~and the trunk grew wider. The biggest ring is under the bark around the outside of the trunk. It was built during the last year of the tree's life.

If you count the rings, starting in the middle, you will know how many years the tree lived. But this is a big job because redwoods live 2,000 years or more. However, the rangers have done the counting fob for us. As a rule they put markers to show the numbers of years as the tree grows from babyhood to old age.

Naturally we want to know the ages of the redwoods still growing in their grove. But we don't want to chop them down to find out. An expert woodman can bore a hole and draw out a core of wood from inside the trunk. The core shows a sample o€ the rings, lined up in a row.„ When counted, they reveal how 1^=tg the tree has been living.

A redwood expert studies the Big Trees all his life. He watches how fast the baby trees grow. He measures how much wider the older trunks grow in ten or 20 years. These and other things help him to figure the ages of his favorite trees. When asked about a strange redwood, he measures its height, the thickness of its bark and the width of its trunk. He also notes where it grew and the trees around it. His answer may not be perfect, but it's certainly better than chopping down the stately old tree.

 

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